No. 18 ASU ready for ‘show’ of ‘spotlight’ game vs. No. 1 Kansas

TEMPE, Ariz — With the New Year approaching, it’s a time to look back and reflect on some of the best and worst of 2018.

As far as the biggest games of this calendar year in Arizona sports, Saturday’s for No. 18 Arizona State has to rank highly on the list.

The Sun Devils host undefeated No. 1 Kansas three days before Christmas.

“Just to see two ranked teams, battling it out, Saturday evening, primetime hours — I think it’s gonna be a show,” redshirt senior Zylan Cheatham said Thursday.

“It’s a great thing for our fans, a great thing for our university, for college basketball,” Hurley said. “It’s a spotlight game. Saturday night, it’s gonna be a big-time atmosphere and our players are ready for it.”

Hurley, of course, and last year’s team pulled off one of the upsets of the season in Lawrence taking down then-No. 2 Kansas 95-85.

As far as where the Sun Devils are at in their season compared to last year, though, there are plenty of differences.

Last year, ASU was coming into Allen Fieldhouse undefeated while this season’s squad already has two losses and is coming off one from Monday against Vanderbilt.

In the 81-65 defeat, the team’s struggles escaping a stagnant offense and bad shots led to a putrid 32.3 field goal percentage.

Instead of rolling in red-hot with momentum, this ASU team has plenty to correct.

“We miscommunicated in the last game,” Cheatham said. “Our emphasis has been ball movement, player movement, spacing — stuff like that. Trying to get easier buckets out of the flow of the offense.”

Another zig for this year where last season zags was the 2017-18 team being led by three senior guards that had a clear offensive identity and knew each other extremely well.

This season, the three leading scorers for ASU — freshman Luguentz Dort, sophomore Kimani Lawrence and Cheatham — did not play against Kansas. Dort was still in high school, Lawrence was injured and Cheatham was sitting out for a season after transferring. That speaks to the aforementioned issues this team is ironing out as a fairly new group.

“Actually, we watched it here,” Cheatham said of last year’s game, referring to the team’s film room in Tempe where he viewed the game with others that did not make the trip.

“I celebrated it just like I played,” he said. “We were (the) utmost happy for our guys.”

The last major difference is the play of sparkplug sophomore guard Remy Martin.

Martin’s breakout game as a freshman was that Kansas matchup last year. He scored a career-high 21 points on 11 shots and his rabid motor showed with five steals.

This year, Martin has been an immense disappointment thus far, heading into the season looking like the holdover from last year to lead this group but instead shooting only 33.3 percent from the field.

His play on the year, including in the loss to Vanderbilt when he shot 3-for-12, speaks to what ASU has to focus on doing to course-correct at the right time before its biggest game of the season.

“Everyone had good intentions,” Hurley said of the offense in that game. “They were trying to make a play and we just needed to be a little bit … make the extra pass a little better and draw help and then find the open teammate and sometimes it’s reminding guys that we have to have purpose when we drive.”

Finding that calming center as attackers for the learning and young Dort, Lawrence and Martin is the key.

“It comes down to just tightening your offensive game up through skill work, also execution and film study and seeing the opportunities that maybe were not taken care of on that end of the floor,” Hurley said. “We have proven that we have guys that are super athletic that can get to the basket effectively and the next phase is now as teams adjust we have to adjust also.”

Looking beyond the obvious long-term implications a win in this game could bring for the program, how Arizona State makes those necessary tweaks and challenges their most difficult opponent to date is a tone-setter for the rest of the way in their second-to-last game before conference play begins.

“I know the energy, the electricity in the crowd … We gotta hold up our end of the bargain and I’m sure they’re gonna play at a high level,” Hurley said. “We want to see two heavyweights going at it. We feel we’ve competed with some of the very best teams already this year and been able to win or be very, very respectable so we’re looking forward to seeing where we stand.”

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